Sandy Bridge-E hits the market with more cores, more threads

Intel has launched its high-end Sandy Bridge E processors.

When Intel launched its "Sandy Bridge" second-generation Core processors in January year, it launched only "mainstream" parts, with prices ranging from about $64 for Pentium-branded processors, up to about $340 for the latest Core i7-2700K. Fast as they were, the high-end enthusiast processors were stuck on the previous generation Nehalem architecture. No longer: Sandy Bridge E is here.

Original Sandy Bridge processors have up to four cores, up to eight threads, 8 MiB cache, two memory channels, an integrated GPU, and PCIe 2.0. The cores themselves haven't changed for Sandy Bridge E, but there are more of them, and their supporting infrastructure has seen a hefty update: Sandy Bridge E processors have up to six cores, up to 12 threads, up to 15 MiB cache, four memory channels, no integrated GPU, and PCIe 3.0. The only thing not changed is clock speeds: the $990 top end Core i7 3960X (6 cores, 12 threads, 15 MiB cache) has a base clock of 3.3 GHz, with a maximum of 3.9 GHz, comparable to the 3.5/3.9 GHz of the Core i7 2700K.

Also launching today is the $555 Core i7 3930K; 6 cores, 12 threads, 12 MiB cache, 3.2/3.8 GHz. Next year, Intel will release a 4-core, 8-thread Core i7 3820, with clock speeds of 3.6/3.9 GHz and 10 MiB cache. Pricing for that is expected to be around $300. All the Sandy Bridge E processors have a 130 W power rating, compared to 95 W for the highest-end mainstream Sandy Bridges.

With the new chips comes a new socket—Socket 2011—and a new chipset, though again this will seem awfully familiar. Sandy Bridge E is paired with the X79 chipset, which offers a specification that's all but identical to Sandy Bridge's P67 chipset. Intel initially planned to give X79 an all-new I/O controller named SCU that would include support for both SATA and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). Intel had unspecified problems with this, so X79 offers the same combination of two 6 Gbps plus four 3 Gbps SATA connections.

The two 6-core processors available now are both overclockable, with unrestricted clock multipliers. The four-core processor will be more restricted. In an unusual move, the Sandy Bridge E processors don't include a fan/heatsink unit, even when bought in retail packaging. Instead, Intel is selling two separate cooling solutions. One is a traditional cheap fan and heatsink that looks similar to the one currently used on retail Sandy Bridge processors. The other is a sealed water cooling system with a water block, radiator, and fan, mirroring AMD's decision to ship a similar water cooling unit for Bulldozer. Serious overclockers will likely want something with more bulk and heat dissipation power, but as an introduction to water-cooled overclocking Intel's solution may find its fans.

The performance of Sandy Bridge E is much as would be expected: per Anand and Tech Report, it's slightly faster for single-threaded applications (thanks to that huge cache) and about 50 percent faster for multithreaded applications (thanks to having 50 percent more threads) than Sandy Bridge.

The price and performance mean that Sandy Bridge E will likely be of only limited appeal. Most of the high-end desktop market is already satisfied by the cheaper four core, eight thread i7 2600 and i7 2700 models. Only those who simply must have the fastest single socket processor around will have any interest in Sandy Bridge E. Fast as it is, the market Intel is aiming at just isn't that big, and as the mid-range processors become ever more capable, is set to decline further.

Sandy Bridge desktop processors have corresponding Xeon parts, the Xeon E3 series. Sandy Bridge E will gain similar counterparts, but they're not releasing just yet. That's because Sandy Bridge E has a bug in its virtualization hardware, forcing Intel to disable VT-d I/O virtualization (though VT-x CPU virtualization still works). Intel regards that as tolerable for the desktop processors—the existing "K" series Sandy Bridge processors already have VT-d disabled—but not for server workloads, where VT-d is required to perform direct assignment of network interfaces to virtual machines.

Update: Intel's Ark site was updated after publication to include the new processors and it says that they do in fact support VT-d, which means that Intel has managed to get the (fixed) C2 stepping out in time after all.

When the problem is fixed and the Xeon processors do start to ship in the first quarter next year, they'll pack even more punch than the desktop parts. The Sandy Bridge E desktop parts may have six cores and up to 15 MiB cache, but the die itself has eight cores and 20 MiB cache (and with 2.2 billion transistors, is even larger than AMD's 2 billion transistor Bulldozer die). Some of those cores and cache are disabled for the desktop processors. For the server-oriented Xeon processors, they'll all be enabled. The Xeon parts are due to ship with the Xeon E5 branding, and model numbers from 2603 to 2690.

All the Sandy Bridge E processors have a 130 W power rating, compared to 95 W for the high end Sandy Bridges.

The way this is worded is sort of confusing. Describing the new chips as "new enthusiast Sandy Bridge chips" and old chips as "older mainstream Sandy Bridge chips" would be a lot easier to understand -- referring to the mainstream chips as "high end Sandy Bridge" is the particularly misleading part.

The people who buy "extreme" edition processors are the ones least affected by the economic downturn. If you are even glancing at the price tag, this processor line isn't for you. However, somewhere there is a man smoking a cigarette rolled in a hundred dollar bill pondering a processor upgrade.

Golgatha wrote:

$900-$1000 for the entry level hex core or $1300-$1400 for the extreme edition.

It continues to amaze me that nerds, a demographic more concerned than most with meaningless pedantic minutiae, scientific (or pseudoscientific) accuracy, and consistency, should insist on the misleading and inaccurate use of the SI prefixes. What exactly is it the upside? About the only thing I see is so that they can justify smug (if ill-founded) claims that "marketing guys" are trying to "rip you off" when they "lie" about how big hard disks are.

All the Sandy Bridge E processors have a 130 W power rating, compared to 95 W for the high end Sandy Bridges.

The way this is worded is sort of confusing. Describing the new chips as "new enthusiast Sandy Bridge chips" and old chips as "older mainstream Sandy Bridge chips" would be a lot easier to understand -- referring to the mainstream chips as "high end Sandy Bridge" is the particularly misleading part.

Otherwise, very concise and informative article.

Yes, true, it's awkward, there are sub-95 W old-Sandy Bridges, but all the high-end mainstream parts (which are, honestly, just plain high end in terms of their performance) are 95 W.

Even though you could overclock the Sandy Bridge CPUs like mad, they didn't completely dominate the older i7 part. I am guessing this has now changed with SB-E.

No matter, I want Ivy Bridge and hopefully integrated Lightpeak/Thunderbolt - I can wait.

Thunderbolt won't be part of the Ivy Bridge platform. Some motherboards might include separate Light Peak controllers on their motherboards, but it won't be part of the chipset. Intel has confirmed that (and also confirmed that USB 3 will be integrated).

I've been considering building a new box, and to be honest I'm confused as hell by Intel's parts. I don't know what's what, and they've got a different socket for everything it seems. What's new? What's old? How do I tell a new i7 from an old one? I'd like to keep thermal stuff down, so why are these new ones hotter compared to the last model?

Does Intel even have a direction where they're heading? I can't make heads nor tails of what they're doing. I wish they'd just say "here is the current generation for server, high end, mid range and budget. Thank you!" and name them something easily group-able. And then use a different name for the next batch.

I've been considering building a new box, and to be honest I'm confused as hell by Intel's parts. I don't know what's what, and they've got a different socket for everything it seems. What's new? What's old? How do I tell a new i7 from an old one? I'd like to keep thermal stuff down, so why are these new ones hotter compared to the last model?

Does Intel even have a direction where they're heading? I can't make heads nor tails of what they're doing. I wish they'd just say "here is the current generation for server, high end, mid range and budget. Thank you!" and name them something easily group-able. And then use a different name for the next batch.

Aghhhhhh!

Having just been through this, one clue: get your information from ark.intel.com rather than browsing from the www.intel.com home page. Not only is the information much more concise (no marketing to speak of), it's easy to compare, and if something is "end of life" they'll tell you that. I've never spotted any info on pre-release product either place though - you've apparently got to find that in the tech press.

I just built a PC with i7-2600 and Z68 motherboard after a couple of years of wanting a really fast processor. Lesson learned - that 2600 sits there with 2 of the 4 cores parked all the time (turned off for power saving) - my normal use of the PC never lights up half the processing power. I like it, but lesson learned. I could have gotten pretty much identical performance from a less expensive i5.

I've been considering building a new box, and to be honest I'm confused as hell by Intel's parts. I don't know what's what, and they've got a different socket for everything it seems. What's new? What's old? How do I tell a new i7 from an old one? I'd like to keep thermal stuff down, so why are these new ones hotter compared to the last model?

Does Intel even have a direction where they're heading? I can't make heads nor tails of what they're doing. I wish they'd just say "here is the current generation for server, high end, mid range and budget. Thank you!" and name them something easily group-able. And then use a different name for the next batch.

Aghhhhhh!

Having just been through this, one clue: get your information from ark.intel.com rather than browsing from the http://www.intel.com home page. Not only is the information much more concise (no marketing to speak of), it's easy to compare, and if something is "end of life" they'll tell you that. I've never spotted any info on pre-release product either place though - you've apparently got to find that in the tech press.

I just built a PC with i7-2600 and Z68 motherboard after a couple of years of wanting a really fast processor. Lesson learned - that 2600 sits there with 2 of the 4 cores parked all the time (turned off for power saving) - my normal use of the PC never lights up half the processing power. I like it, but lesson learned. I could have gotten pretty much identical performance from a less expensive i5.

The way I look at it - Pentium = Grandparents, i3 = Parents, i5 = Gaming machine, i7 = you have a task in mind that uses the CPU. If you're not sure what you want, there's a really good chance you don't need Sandy Bridge-E, which is super enthusiast i7, it's purely about throwing a lot of power at a problem and isn't great value for money. I'm thinking about one for my girlfriends dad who does a lot of video editing and is finding his core2quad not cutting it, but an i7 at $300 is looking really tempting.

If there isn't 800 versions of the motherboard with that socket on Newegg it's probably not what you want either . Socket2011 is again enthusiast, not consumer.

Something I've really found though is that bottlenecks are rarely caused by the CPU anymore unless you're heavily into graphics or video. Photo work or ripping a bluray can be really annoying on my current Athlon, but that's about 5% of what I use my PC for. A Core i5 would do it easily, it's just not worth the upgrade costs to eliminate the annoyances involved with that 5%.

GPU, on the other hand, still seems to need that 2 year update.

What really has be wondering about this whole thing is the i7 3820 though. It sounds like it will be dropping around the same time as Ivy Bridge, which will offer similar speeds at lower power. So... what's the point of it?

It continues to amaze me that nerds, a demographic more concerned than most with meaningless pedantic minutiae, scientific (or pseudoscientific) accuracy, and consistency, should insist on the misleading and inaccurate use of the SI prefixes.

The main problem I have with MiB, KiB, etc. is they do not properly clarify things because they leave any usage of KB, MB as ambiguous.

They're advocated by people more interested in "reclaiming" the SI units than in resolving the ambiguity, which would take two new units (one unambiguously a multiple of 1000, the other a multiple of 1024; they have only provided one of those).

If the entire world switched to consistently using the new units for 1024 exclusively then that would resolve the ambiguity, but that is never going to happen, even for new software and documents let alone for old ones. So when you still see KB in places, you still don't know what it means. In the past it was usually fairly clear from the context, and I have never seen KiB etc. appear in a place where it wasn't obvious that the units were 1024 multiples regardless. So what is the real upside?

(Well, that and the units are IMO ugly and the words they stand for even more ugly.)

Once again this means waiting to see if this new platform is a "keeper" or tragically flawed, and then waiting for the prices to descend below bleeding-edge pricing, only to buy them just before they introduce yet another new chip and socket combination.

It continues to amaze me that nerds, a demographic more concerned than most with meaningless pedantic minutiae, scientific (or pseudoscientific) accuracy, and consistency, should insist on the misleading and inaccurate use of the SI prefixes.

The main problem I have with MiB, KiB, etc. is they do not properly clarify things because they leave any usage of KB, MB as ambiguous.

They're advocated by people more interested in "reclaiming" the SI units than in resolving the ambiguity, which would take two new units (one unambiguously a multiple of 1000, the other a multiple of 1024; they have only provided one of those).

Texts that use the new prefixes use the old prefixes unambiguously correctly.

Quote:

If the entire world switched to consistently using the new units for 1024 exclusively then that would resolve the ambiguity, but that is never going to happen, even for new software and documents let alone for old ones. So when you still see KB in places, you still don't know what it means. In the past it was usually fairly clear from the context, and I have never seen KiB etc. appear in a place where it wasn't obvious that the units were 1024 multiples regardless. So what is the real upside?

The big problem is the reverse. People use GB and TB correctly, to measure hard disks, and then people complain that the formatted capacity is wrong by 7% or 9% (respectively).

I've also seen many people argue that 100 Mb Ethernet is 100 * 2^20 bits per second. It isn't. It's a 125 MHz clock with a 4B5B encoding, producing 100 million bits per second, 12.5 MB/s, but only 11.9 MiB/s.

Once again this means waiting to see if this new platform is a "keeper" or tragically flawed, and then waiting for the prices to descend below bleeding-edge pricing, only to buy them just before they introduce yet another new chip and socket combination.

Companies change sockets the way some change underwear. Least the motherboards, processors, and memory can be shipped off to some forgotten country and processed for their rare metals.

Once again this means waiting to see if this new platform is a "keeper" or tragically flawed, and then waiting for the prices to descend below bleeding-edge pricing, only to buy them just before they introduce yet another new chip and socket combination.

The previous Core i7 9xx parts had three memory channels. This has four. That alone adds more than a hundred pins. I think it also has more PCIe resources, again adding pins.

The people who buy "extreme" edition processors are the ones least affected by the economic downturn. If you are even glancing at the price tag, this processor line isn't for you. However, somewhere there is a man smoking a cigarette rolled in a hundred dollar bill pondering a processor upgrade.

Golgatha wrote:

$900-$1000 for the entry level hex core or $1300-$1400 for the extreme edition.

Try again Intel. Not in this economy.

@AfognakThere are people in this world who make a living. Some of them do that with a computer. For some of those people, increased processor power enables them to do more work. It's possible to make a very shrewd calculation that the increased productivity allowed by a faster processor might pay for itself fairly quickly. People with no experience in being productive don't always understand such tradeoffs.

It continues to amaze me that nerds, a demographic more concerned than most with meaningless pedantic minutiae, scientific (or pseudoscientific) accuracy, and consistency, should insist on the misleading and inaccurate use of the SI prefixes. What exactly is it the upside? About the only thing I see is so that they can justify smug (if ill-founded) claims that "marketing guys" are trying to "rip you off" when they "lie" about how big hard disks are.

If I tell you I have 24GB of RAM, are you confused? Did you think I meant 24,000,000,000 bytes? Or did you understand that RAM numbers are fundamentally base 2 because of how the addressing works? 16MB of RAM has never meant 16,000,000 bytes, and people who would be confused as to whether 16MB is 16,000,000 or 16x1024x1024 probably don't understand what a byte is to begin with, and aren't actually impacted by whether memory is in 1000's or 1024's - they don't get it anyway.

I'm tempted to ask my parents how much RAM their computers even have. I'm just as likely to get back the size of the hard drive. The great thing is that drive manufacturers understand the non-technical consumer and also include measures like '150,000 songs or 50,000 pictures' - which are totally meaningless from a technical perspective, but might give the computer illiterate a better feel for what the numbers boil down to for them. We should push for standards bodies to change to units like KPicts if we're really worried about these users being confused by the distinction between MB vs MiB. (Uh oh, is a KPict 1000 or 1024?) A computer with 8GB or 8GiB doesn't mean anything to them in either case, they just want to know if it will run well enough.

So... people who are confused can just round it to decimal 1,000's and not worry (and probably already DO without realizing that RAM isn't in neat 1000's), nerds can complain that hard drive makers don't add sectors on drives in a base 2 manner, we don't need another stupid abbreviation for MB, and did I mention that Pluto is a dwarf planet now?

It continues to amaze me that nerds, a demographic more concerned than most with meaningless pedantic minutiae, scientific (or pseudoscientific) accuracy, and consistency, should insist on the misleading and inaccurate use of the SI prefixes. What exactly is it the upside? About the only thing I see is so that they can justify smug (if ill-founded) claims that "marketing guys" are trying to "rip you off" when they "lie" about how big hard disks are.

Yeah, but just because it is wrong, of course it does not really matter that much anymore. What are +/- 50GB at the end of the day. But just because it says 1TB on the box, and the OS tells it is 1TB, it is not 1TB, it is actually 936 GiB and not 999.7 GB.

And this is the rub. HD manufacturers used to use powers of two (yes they did - that's why the sector size is 512 bytes), but sometime during the eighties, makers of external HDs started reporting them as powers of ten, meaning that a drive from an unscrupulous manufacturer could be reported as larger than the one from the honest one, despite them using the same mechanism. The result was that more started using powers of ten, and as that market consolidated in the late eighties/early nineties, everyone ended up with at least one company that had sold a lot of drives using powers of ten, and thus they were all liable to potential lawsuits. Following the theory of the big lie, they started reporting everything as powers of ten.

DrPizza wrote:

Floppy disks? A combination of both. The canonical "1.44 MB" floppy? That's 1,440 kibibytes. It's neither a power of ten nor a power of two!

That used to be 1.4 MB, actually, or 1440 KB, but I'm sure someone wrote 1.44 MB on them as well. And you forgot that CDs are measured in power-of-two bytes and DVDs in power-of-ten bytes.

DrPizza wrote:

It continues to amaze me that nerds, a demographic more concerned than most with meaningless pedantic minutiae, scientific (or pseudoscientific) accuracy, and consistency, should insist on the misleading and inaccurate use of the SI prefixes. What exactly is it the upside? About the only thing I see is so that they can justify smug (if ill-founded) claims that "marketing guys" are trying to "rip you off" when they "lie" about how big hard disks are.

Several reasons. One is that history does support our view of it, and you need look no further than the sector sizes of any current HD to verify it for yourself - which means that doing it the other way means letting the Ministry of Truth win. Another is that byte in itself is a power-of-two measurement. If it were up to me, I would abandon the use of the unit byte entirely for hard disks and order that disk sizes be reported in bits and RAM sizes in bytes with power-of-two prefixes, thereby eliminating any confusion. Heck, I'd even use the idiot GiB prefix for the RAM (but I don't think I'd pronounce it "gibi" - that's just silly) to make a clean break with a troubled past, but to say that a mixture of power of two and power of ten is the correct way to measure storage space is the worst of all worlds.

If there isn't 800 versions of the motherboard with that socket on Newegg it's probably not what you want either .

Seriously, I've used that method when I'm not sure if I've been living in a technology bubble or not.

I am still confused about the use of the old product names - I'm just getting used to the i-series and the xeon equivalents, but I'll be damned if I know what the story is with "Pentiums" and "Celerons" in the current lineup. Just what are those?

And this is the rub. HD manufacturers used to use powers of two (yes they did - that's why the sector size is 512 bytes),

1) That isn't always true. There are hard disks with sector sizes of e.g. 520 bytes (512 data, 8 checksum). 2) That doesn't support the claim you're making. Just because hard disks are addressable in units of 512 (520, 4096, whatever) doesn't mean that the total capacity was reported in bogus base 2 units. There's a step missing from your argument.3) Early hard disks didn't even have hard sectors--that's why you had to low-level format. Floppy disks, you still do. Meaning the sector size is up to you anyway.

Quote:

but sometime during the eighties, makers of external HDs started reporting them as powers of ten, meaning that a drive from an unscrupulous manufacturer could be reported as larger than the one from the honest one, despite them using the same mechanism. The result was that more started using powers of ten, and as that market consolidated in the late eighties/early nineties, everyone ended up with at least one company that had sold a lot of drives using powers of ten, and thus they were all liable to potential lawsuits. Following the theory of the big lie, they started reporting everything as powers of ten.

[citation needed]

Quote:

That used to be 1.4 MB, actually, or 1440 KB, but I'm sure someone wrote 1.44 MB on them as well. And you forgot that CDs are measured in power-of-two bytes and DVDs in power-of-ten bytes.

It was 1.44, because it was a doubling of the 720 kiB standard double density disk, to produce a 2 x 720 = 1440 kiB or "1.44 MB" high density disk.

Quote:

Several reasons. One is that history does support our view of it, and you need look no further than the sector sizes of any current HD to verify it for yourself

But that is nonsense. You can't make that extrapolation. DVD sectors are powers of 2, but total capacities are power of ten, for example.